Feelings of Naught
by Scelerata
Summary: Sometimes the answers that find us aren't the ones we wanted. [2009]


It wasn't supposed to hurt this bad. He had thought, when all the answers finally came back to him, he'd feel relieved. He had thought that it would finally put the sick feeling he'd harbored in his stomach for days to rest. But as he watched Axel lurch, gasping for breath, he found that this wasn't the case. There was something about the way the Nobody looked at him, face bruised, but not nearly as wounded as the look in his eyes, that ate at him.

He briefly wondered if this was worth it. The fighting, the fleeing, the way he felt compelled to invest his being in something he wasn't even sure he understood. He was chasing a mystery, a dark, sad memory, while everything he had ever known or held dear was standing right in front of him, looking as though the world was crashing down around them, and frankly, Roxas felt as though maybe it was.

"Axel…" He broached, and he could just taste the bitter sadness on his own voice. He didn't know what he wanted to say, or what he even could say, that might take the sting out of the situation. He was turning his back on what had been his best friend, and dearest partner, and there was no going back now.

Axel just grinned. A weak, sad grin, but a grin all the same, and somehow, that only bothered Roxas more. It might've made him feel better if Axel could have been just a little hateful about it; a little bitter, a little blame-laying, something, anything to prove that there was no justification for all this.

But that was never Axel's style.

"Let's…meet again. In-…in the next life." Axel offered vainly, knowing even as the words passed his lips that he was only making hollow promises, to ease the situation. It was true, he was angry, and he was bitter, and he was absolutely miserable, but somehow, none of it seemed like it was Roxas' fault, and that was the damnedest thing. It would have been so easy to point fingers. You never should have left. Why did you have to question things? Why couldn't you be satisfied?

He wanted to think these things, but he couldn't. Roxas wanted Answers, and even if he had never wanted to admit it, Axel had wanted him to find them. He hated that his closest companion had to wander the worlds feeling hollow, even if it was the fate resigned to Nobodies like them.

No, the only thing he wished, was that it could have ended differently.

Roxas was staring at the floor. He'd never looked so young, so powerless, and that was a sad sight. His brilliant blue eyes wavered, closed, then opened again, and he tilted his head up, to look at the one face in existence that he didn't want to face. Not now, right before he was about to relinquish himself so wholly to that which he didn't known, and hardly understood.

"Y-…yeah." He whispered sadly, watching the corner of Axel's mouth twitch in a sad, silent laugh. "I'll…be waiting…"

Axel could hear the very hopelessness in his words, and it didn't take him hardly a moment to understand the emptiness of it. It was a promise as empty as his own, and it disgusted and saddened him that they both felt such an intense need to grasp at straws.

"Silly." Axel murmured, the contrived nature of it all finally getting to him. That was the real problem; neither of them wished to say goodbye, and he supposed that Roxas felt just as intensely as he did that it was best to simply keep pretending that this wasn't the end. But it was the end, wasn't it?

Slowly, Axel relaxed his body, and the snakelike tendrils of the darkness beckoned him back into their falsely nurturing depths. He allowed his eyes to fall downcast, and struggled with the words that danced upon his tongue. "Just…just because you have a next life-"

Inside, Roxas flinched, feeling disgusted with himself, and the very hand of fate that had thrust him so coldly into this. A knot settled in his throat, as Axel closed his eyes, and delved back into the very depths of darkness that had spawned him, leaving Roxas alone with bitter tears that bit at his eyes, before cascading down his cheeks in sour rivulets. And the very last sight that Axel saw, before the darkness overcame him, was such a sight, the very proud, ever-so-familiar face as that of his beloved, laced with pain that was, he suspected, his fault, and his alone.

_They say that which is without a heart feels nothing, but they are wrong.  
The truth is, that which is without a heart feels nothing...but sorrow._


End file.
